The Fishing Net and the Spider Web
Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians
Authors: Fogu, Claudio
Free Preview- Explores the role of the Mediterranean and associated imaginaries in the formation of Italian identityMoves beyond the focus on the nation-state that has characterized much previous scholarshipReinterprets key processes and episodes in Italian history, from the Kingdom of Naples through to the twentieth century
Buy this book
- About this book
-
This book explores the role of Mediterranean imaginaries in one of the preeminent tropes of Italian history: the formation or 'making of' Italians. While previous scholarship on the construction of Italian identity has often focused too narrowly on the territorial notion of the nation-state, and over-identified Italy with its capital, Rome, this book highlights the importance of the Mediterranean Sea to the development of Italian collective imaginaries. From this perspective, this book re-interprets key historical processes and actors in the history of modern Italy, and thereby challenges mainstream interpretations of Italian collective identity as weak or incomplete. Ultimately, it argues that Mediterranean imaginaries acted as counterweights to the solidification of a 'national' Italian identity, and still constitute alternative but equally viable modes of collective belonging.
- About the authors
-
Claudio Fogu is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.
- Reviews
-
“In a series of innovative excursions into the entangled fields of Italian and Mediterranean studies, Claudio Fogu confronts the complexities of the making of modern Italian identity. Snapping the chains that consistently direct Italy north towards the colonising pole of European modernity, these interlocking essays provocatively pull us south into the critically imaginative possibilities provided by the largely negated networks of the Mediterranean. An essential read for rethinking both the Mediterranean and Italian modernity.”
—Iain Chambers, University of Naples – L’Orientale, Italy“This meticulously researched study eloquently brings to light for the first time the complex and often contradictory role that the shifting collective notion of a Mediterranean belonging and even identity has played in the political imagination of Italians, in contrast and often opposition to the prevalent, Eurocentric notion of Italy’s ‘Europeanness.’ Claudio Fogu’s bold rethinking of the cultural history of modern Italy will reshape the way we conceive of both Italy and the Mediterranean as a whole in a global and postcolonial context.”
—Lucia Re, UCLA, USA
- Table of contents (9 chapters)
-
-
Introduction: Mediterranean Imaginaries
Pages 1-10
-
Making Italians, Making Southerners
Pages 11-31
-
The Fishing Net and the Spider Web
Pages 33-82
-
Homo Mediterraneus
Pages 83-113
-
Epiphanic Mediterraneanism
Pages 115-157
-
Table of contents (9 chapters)
Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
-
- Book Title
- The Fishing Net and the Spider Web
- Book Subtitle
- Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians
- Authors
-
- Claudio Fogu
- Series Title
- Mediterranean Perspectives
- Copyright
- 2020
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Copyright Holder
- The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
- eBook ISBN
- 978-3-030-59857-0
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-030-59857-0
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-3-030-59856-3
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- XIII, 296
- Number of Illustrations
- 11 b/w illustrations, 19 illustrations in colour
- Topics
